Pyle was quiet, he seemed modest, sometimes that first day I had to lean forward to catch what he was saying. And he was very, very serious. Several times he seemed to shrink up within himself at the noise of the American
Press on the terrace above-the terrace which was popularly believed to be safer from hand-grenades. But he criticised nobody.
"Have you read York Harding?" he asked. "No. No, I don't think so. What did he write?" He gazed at a milk-bar across the street arid said dreamily, "That looks like a good sodafountain."* I wondered what depth of homesickness lay behind his odd choice of what to observe in a scene so unfamiliar. But hadn't I on my first walk up the rue Catinat noticed first the shop with the Guerlain perfume* and comforted myself with the thought that, after all, Europe was only distant thirty hours? He looked reluctantly away from the milkbar and said, "York wrote a book called The Advance of Red China. It's a very profound book." "I haven't read it. Do you know him?" He nodded solemnly and lapsed into silence. But he brok^ it again a moment later to modify the impression he had given. "I don't know him w.ell," he said. "I guess only met him twice." I liked him for that-to consider it was boasting to claim acquaintance with-what was his name? --York Harding. I was to learn later that he had an enormous respect for what he called serious writers. That term excluded novelists, poets and dramatists unless they had what he called a contemporary theme, and even then it was better to read the straight stuff* as you got it from York.
I said, "You know, if you live in a place for long you cease to read about it."
"Of course I always like to know what the man on the spot has to say," he replied guardedly. "And then cheek it with York?"
"Yes." Perhaps he had noticed the irony, because he added with his habitual politeness,
"I'd take it as a very great privilege if you could find time to brief me on the 40
jttiain points. You see, York was here more than two years
ago." • I liked his loyalty to Harding-whoever Harding was. It was a change from the denigrations of the Pressmen and their immature cynicism. I said,
"Have another bottle of heCr and I'll try to give you an idea of things." " I began, while he watched me intently like a prize p"pil, by explaining the situation in the North, in Tonkin,* where the French in those days were hanging on to the ISIta of the Red River,*
which contained Hanoi and the ^nly northern port, Haiphong.* Here most of the rice was grown, and when the harvest was ready the annual battle for the rice always began*
"That's the North" I said. "The French may hold, poor devils, if the Chinese don't come to help theVietminh. A war of jungle and mountain and marsh, paddy flelds where you wade shoulder-high and the enemy simply disappear, bury their arms, put on peasant dress. . . . But you can rot comfortably in the damp in Hanoi. They don't throw bombs there. God knows why. You could call it a regular war." '"AndhereintheSouth?"
"The French control the main roads until seven in the fevOning: they control the watch towers after that, and the cities-part of them. That doesn't mean you are safe, or there wouldn't be iron grilles in front of the restaurants."
How often I had explained all this before. I was a record always turned on for the benefit of newcomers-the visiting Member of Parliament, the new British Minister. Sometimes I Would wake up in the night saying, "Take the case of the Caodaists.''Or the Hoa-Haos or the BinhXuyen,* all the private armies who sold their services for money or revenge. Strangers found them picturesque, but there is liolhingpictutesque in treachery-and distrust.
41
"And now," I said, "there's General The. He was Cao-daist Chief of Staff, but he's taken to the hills* to fight both sides, the French, the Communists. . . ."
"York," Pyle said, "wrote that what the East needed was a Third Force ."Perhaps I should have seen that fanatic gleam, the quick response to a phrase, the magic sound of figures: Fifth Column, Third Force, Seventh Day. I might haye saved all of us a lot of trouble, even Pyle, if I had realised the direction of that indefatigable young brain. But I left him with the arid bones of background* and took my daily walk up and down the rue Catinat. He would have to learn for himself the real background that held you as a smell does: the gold of the rice-fields under a flat late sun: the fisher's fragile cranes hovering over the fields* like mos-quitoes: the cups of tea on an old abbot's platform,* with his bed and his commercial calendars,* his buckets and broken cups and the junk of a lifetime washed up around his chair: the mollusc hats of the girls repairing the road where a mine had burst: the gold and the young green and the bright dresses of the south, and in the north the deep browns and the black clothes and the circle of enemy mountains and the drone of planes. When I first came I counted the days of my assignment, like a schoolboy marking off the days of term; I thought I was tied to what was left of a Bloomsbury square* and the 73
bus passing the portico of Euston* and springtime in the local in Torrington Place.* Now the bulbs would be out in the square garden, and I didn't care a damn. I wanted a day punctuated by those quick reports that might be car-exhausts or might be grenades, I wanted to keep the sight of those silk-trousered figures moving with grace through the humid noon, I wanted Phuong.and my home had shifted its ground eight thousand miles. I turned at the High Commissioner's* house, where the
42
^Foreign Legion* stood on guard in their white kepis* and their scarlet epaulettes, crossed by the Cathedral and came back by the dreary wall of the Vietnamese Surete that seemed to smell of urine and injustice. And yet that too was ^ part of home, like the dark passages on upper floors one avoided in childhood. The new dirty magazines were out on the bookstalls near the quay-Tabu and Illusion* and the sailors were drinking beer on the pavement, an e^y mark for a home-made bomb. I thought of Phuong, who would be haggling over the price of fish in the third street down on the left before going for her elevenses to the milk-bar (I always knew where she was in those days), and Pyle ran easily and naturally out of my mind. I didn't even mention him to Phuong, when we sat down to lunch together in our room over the rue Catinat and she wore her best flowered silk robe because it was two years to a day aij^ we had met in the Grand Monde in Cholon. ^*
(2)
Neither of us mentioned him when we woke on the morning after his death. Phuong had risen before I was properly awake and had our tea ready. One is not jealous of the dead, and it seemed easy to me that morning to take up our old life together.
"Will you stay tonight?" I asked Phuong over the crois-sants* as casually as I could. "I will have to fetch my box."
"The police may be there," I said. "I had better come with you." It was the nearest we came that day to speaking of Pyle.
Pyle had a flat in a new villa near the rue Duranton, off one of those main streets which the French continually subdivided in honour of their generals-so that the rue de Gaulle* became after the third intersection the rue Leclerc,* and that again sooner or later would probably turn abruptly into the rue de Lattre.* Somebody important must have been arriving from Europe by air, for there was a policeman facing the pavement every twenty yards along the route to the High Commissioner's Residence.